Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Top Ten Pearl Jam Moments of 2010: Part 2

5. Live From Saturday Night!

In March, Pearl Jam made their fourth appearance on Saturday Night Live. Despite a history of knocking the roof off of 30 Rock, this show featured the band’s most gentle, heartfelt performances to date with Just Breathe:

and Unthought Known:

Fans were also treated to a very quick cameo by the whole band in a skit called “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

4. Best Friends?

Brad? How did a band other than Pearl Jam make it onto the Top Ten Pearl Jam Moments?

Seriously? Who would ask that question? Were you sleeping through 2010? Though no member of Pearl Jam was necessarily down in their down time, Stone Gossard’s band, Brad, worked incredibly hard to fill all the gaps in a Pearl Jam fan’s year. After the August release of their fourth studio album, Best Friends?, Stone’s riffs could be heard across the Midwest, New York, Seattle, and L.A. All five members of Pearl Jam popped up throughout the year, but Stone and Brad were, by far, the most active in 2010.

3. Of The Earth

Although many fans in the U.S. will cite the show they attended as their personal Pearl Jam highlight of 2010, it was Pearl Jams leap over the pond that garnered the most attention and praise this year. Last December, Pearl Jam announced a fifteen show festival tour across Europe, their first since 2007. What no one really expected was for Pearl Jam to dust off an outtake first mentioned during the "Avocado" recording sessions and debut it during their first show in Europe. If Pearl Jam played any songs other than Of The Earth while in Europe, you’d be hard pressed to prove it. For the weeks following Pearl Jam’s Dublin show our forum and the official forum discussed little else, and my news feed was on fire with headlines about Pearl Jam debuting a new song.

We know that Of The Earth didn’t make the Live on Ten Legs cut. Will it be revisited in the studio? Will it be part of the next album? What about this year’s fan club single? Stay tuned in 2011 to find out.

Both stations pull liberally from Pearl Jam’s collection of live performances and play a concert in its entirely on a semi-daily basis (you can find out when here: SiriusXM / Pearl Jam Radio Online). The Ten Club station seems to be limited to bootlegs, but the SiriusXM station includes "unreleased material from the group's personal music library and side projects, including solo and pre-Pearl Jam music," as well as a weekly call-in show with Ten Club Manager, Tim Bierman, and the on-line station’s DJ, The Rob.

Surely, at some point, even the most hardcore Pearl Jam fan is going to be over exposed to Pearl Jam with nothing else coming out of the radio, but until this year, you never had the tool to test that theory.

1. The Hiatus

“This is the end of our last show of the tour … not last forever but last for a long time.” - Eddie Vedder, July 10, 2010

Wait. What? Is Pearl Jam quitting? You could hear the collective jaws of a million Pearl Jam fans hanging open. Well, it should be said that the above statement is a rough translation of a statement made by Eddie reading phonetically spelled Portuguese, and that his publicist, Nicole Vandenburg, did rush to say, “(It's) nothing serious. He says that at the end of all tours, meaning that the tour is over. I think the remarks got a bit lost in translation.”

Buuuuuuuut … we still don’t have any Pearl Jam shows on our calendar. Oh sure, we had a Brad tour, a few Soundgarden shows, and the announcement of a Vedder-only tour of Australia, but we’re still waiting for our next does of Pearl Jam. Even as recently as December 1st, Ed told fans of the All Encompassing Trip call-in show, “Don’t wait on us. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We’ve got a few things we need to accomplish before we go back and play shows, and do stuff that we’ve already kind of done before,” and that, my friends, was in Ed’s native language.